Indices · 2026-09-01

Six numbers to watch.

Daily market indices for LLM usage: reasoning share, free traffic, open weights, geography, concentration, and blended price. Formulas in the methodology.

420 models catalogued upstream on OpenRouter as of 2026-09-02.

Reasoning share

93.69%

+1.83pp · 30d

Free-traffic share

11.71%

+0.28pp · 30d

HHI (top-10)

552

+51.19 pts · 30d

Median $ / M paid

$0.900

+$0.49 · 30d

Reasoning Share Index

Share of tracked tokens going to reasoning-flagged models.

Tidelines — LLM usage and market share
Data: OpenRouter, Vercel AI Gateway as of 2026-09-01 · Source: tidelines.ai/indices

Free-Traffic Index

Share of tokens routed through :free variants.

Tidelines — LLM usage and market share
Data: OpenRouter, Vercel AI Gateway as of 2026-09-01 · Source: tidelines.ai/indices

HHI top-10 concentration

Herfindahl-Hirschman on the daily top-10 model shares. Higher = more concentrated.

Tidelines — LLM usage and market share
Data: OpenRouter, Vercel AI Gateway as of 2026-09-01 · Source: tidelines.ai/indices

Median blended price paid

Usage-weighted median of (0.3·prompt + 0.7·completion) $ / M tokens across all tracked models.

Tidelines — LLM usage and market share

Peak tracked volume: 19T tokens/day.

Data: OpenRouter, Vercel AI Gateway as of 2026-09-01 · Source: tidelines.ai/indices

Open weights vs closed

Share of tracked tokens routed to open-weights models.

Tidelines — LLM usage and market share
Open-weights
Data: OpenRouter as of 2026-09-01 · Source: tidelines.ai/indices

China vs Western labs

Share of tracked tokens routed to Chinese labs versus US & European labs.

Tidelines — LLM usage and market share
ChinaUS & Europe
Data: OpenRouter as of 2026-09-01 · Source: tidelines.ai/indices

Top-10 HHI

Top-10 model share HHI stood at 552 on 2026-09-01 — higher = more concentrated. Source: Tidelines indices.